DAVOS/BAGHDAD, 27 January 2003 — The United States said yesterday it was ready to attack Iraq alone if allies peeled away, and Britain declared UN inspectors should have time, but not months, to decide if Baghdad was cooperating with them.
Germany’s Die Welt reported today that the United States and Britain want to give UN weapons inspectors until March 1 to conduct their work in Iraq and provide a final report on its arsenals. Quoting government sources in Britain, the newspaper said that people working for or connected with the United States would leave Iraq over the next few weeks.
“Multilateralism cannot become an excuse for inaction,” Powell told the World Economic Forum in the Swiss town of Davos. “We are in no great rush to judgment today or tomorrow, but it is clear that time is running out.”
The UN inspectors report to the Security Council today on their two-month hunt in Iraq for any banned nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Baghdad denies having such arms.
King Hussein of Iraq’s neighbor Jordan hit a pessimistic note, saying in Davos it would take a miracle to find a diplomatic solution to avert a war. “Unfortunately I believe that we’re now a bit too little, too late to see a way out, a diplomatic solution between Iraq and the international community,” the king said from the same stage Powell had used hours earlier.
UN chief arms inspector Hans Blix says Iraq has not filled holes in its arms declaration, is blocking confidential access to scientists and is balking at U-2 surveillance flights. Blix has said Iraq meets queries about data on anthrax, deadly VX nerve gas and Scud missiles with blunt denials, not evidence or documents to account for any missing material.
The head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency, Mohamed El Baradei, will tell the Council his teams have not proved that Iraq is trying to develop atomic bombs, as Washington suspects.
“(El Baradei’s report) won’t reveal any prohibited nuclear arms program,” said Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency. “If we were to find a smoking gun, we wouldn’t wait for an update report. We’d go straight to the Security Council.”
Powell also tried to silence critics at home of a unilateral move by linking the Iraqi regime with Al-Qaeda. He said Iraq had “clear ties to terrorist groups including Al-Qaeda”. The United States has provided no evidence for its assertion that Iraq has links to Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, which it blames for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on US cities.
The leader of the opposition Democrats in the US Senate, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, told the CBS “Face the Nation” program yesterday that Bush had more to do to make the case for war and that the arms inspectors should be given more time.
“The president needs to make a compelling case that Iraq poses a very imminent threat to the United States and...that he has worked through the international community and exhausted all other options,” Daschle said.
China yesterday reinforced its opposition to a war in a telephone conversation between President Jiang Zemin and French leader Jacques Chirac. Jiang and Chirac agreed that the crisis must be solved by political and diplomatic means and within the framework of the UN Security Council, the Xinhua news agency reported.
Iraq’s influential newspaper Babel warned the United States that invading troops would go home in body bags, while ordinary Iraqis said they expected war whatever the inspectors say.
“Even after 100 years, the inspectors still won’t be convinced that Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction. America wants war today, not tomorrow,” Khazem Mansour, a 28-year-old engineer, said in Baghdad.
The US military said that US and British warplanes bombed five Iraqi communications sites yesterday in a “no-fly” zone in southern Iraq that they enforce. Iraq said civilian targets were hit but reported no casualties.
Bahrain, a key regional American ally, has announced it is deploying Patriot missile batteries to counter any possible long-range missile threats to the kingdom. The announcement to deploy Patriots, one of world’s few workable defenses against surface-to-surface guided missiles, came during a visit Saturday by the king, Sheikh Hamad ibn Isa Al-Khalifa to the kingdom’s Royal Field Artillery Unit. (Agencies)
